Setting out to recover the roots of modernity in the boulevards,
interiors, and arcades of the "city of light," Walter Benjamin
dubbed Paris "the capital of the nineteenth century." In this
eagerly anticipated sequel to his acclaimed Coasts of Bohemia: A
Czech History, Derek Sayer argues that Prague could well be seen as
the capital of the much darker twentieth century. Ranging across
twentieth-century Prague's astonishingly vibrant and always
surprising human landscape, this richly illustrated cultural
history describes how the city has experienced (and suffered) more
ways of being modern than perhaps any other metropolis. Located at
the crossroads of struggles between democratic, communist, and
fascist visions of the modern world, twentieth-century Prague
witnessed revolutions and invasions, national liberation and ethnic
cleansing, the Holocaust, show trials, and snuffed-out dreams of
"socialism with a human face." Yet between the wars, when Prague
was the capital of Europe's most easterly parliamentary democracy,
it was also a hotbed of artistic and architectural modernism, and a
center of surrealism second only to Paris. Focusing on these years,
Sayer explores Prague's spectacular modern buildings, monuments,
paintings, books, films, operas, exhibitions, and much more. A
place where the utopian fantasies of the century repeatedly
unraveled, Prague was tailor-made for surrealist Andre Breton's
"black humor," and Sayer discusses the way the city produced
unrivaled connoisseurs of grim comedy, from Franz Kafka and
Jaroslav Hasek to Milan Kundera and Vaclav Havel. A masterful and
unforgettable account of a city where an idling flaneur could just
as easily be a secret policeman, this book vividly shows why Prague
can teach us so much about the twentieth century and what made us
who we are.
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